Ramayana

ராமாயணம் रामायणम्

Also Valmiki Ramayana, Adi Kavya, Ramcharitmanas, Kamba Ramayanam.

What it is#

The Ramayana is the story of a prince exiled for fourteen years on his father’s word, whose wife is carried off by the king of Lanka and recovered after a war, and who then loses her anyway. Valmiki’s Sanskrit poem is called the Adi Kavya, the first poem, and the tradition says the metre came to him when he saw a hunter shoot one of a pair of birds and the grief came out of his mouth as verse. It is shorter and tighter than the Mahabharata and far more often performed, and it has been rewritten in every Indian language, in Buddhist and Jain versions, and across Southeast Asia.

Its shape#

Seven kandas, books: Bala, Ayodhya, Aranya, Kishkindha, Sundara, Yuddha and Uttara, running to about twenty four thousand verses in the Valmiki recension. The Bala and the Uttara kandas are widely held by scholars to be later additions, which matters because the Uttara is where Sita is exiled a second time and where the story ends unhappily. Kamban’s Tamil Iramavataram runs to about ten thousand verses and ends before the Uttara entirely. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is in Awadhi in seven kands and is the version most of north India actually knows.

What it argues about#

These are not settled texts

The epic is read in two incompatible ways and has been for a very long time. One reading takes Rama as maryada purushottama, the best of men within the bounds, and the whole poem as a demonstration of duty kept at impossible cost. The other takes the Uttara kanda seriously and reads it as an indictment: a man who abandons a pregnant wife on the word of a washerman, having already made her walk into fire once, and a kingdom whose perfection rests on her disappearing into the ground. South Indian and Dravidian readings add a third: that Ravana is a southern king destroyed by a northern invasion, and the Tamil political tradition has made that argument explicitly since the twentieth century. Jain versions make Ravana a tragic and admirable figure. None of these is a modern distortion; the disagreement is old.

Episodes worth knowing#

The two boons

Kaikeyi had once saved Dasaratha’s life in battle and been given two boons she never used. On the eve of Rama’s coronation, prompted by her maid Manthara, she asked for them: Bharata crowned and Rama exiled fourteen years. Dasaratha, bound by his own word, could not refuse and could not say it either; Rama heard it from her and left the same day without argument. Bharata, who had wanted none of it, refused the throne and ruled for fourteen years with Rama’s sandals on it. The epic spends more time on this decision than on the war that follows.

The line and the alms

Ravana came to the hut in the forest as a mendicant while the brothers were away, having lured Rama off with a golden deer and Lakshmana after him with a cry for help. Lakshmana, leaving, drew a line and told Sita not to cross it. The beggar asked for alms and would not come to the door, and she stepped over the line to give him food, and was taken. The Lakshmana rekha is not in Valmiki; it enters in later tellings and has become one of the best known images in India, used constantly as a metaphor for a boundary that should not be crossed, often by people arguing that a woman should stay inside one.

The second exile

After the war, after the fire, after the return and the coronation, a washerman in Ayodhya was heard saying he would not take back a wife who had lived in another man’s house, and that the king had set a poor example. Rama sent Sita, pregnant, to the forest. She bore Lava and Kusa in Valmiki’s hermitage, and years later, brought back and asked to prove herself again before the court, called on the earth to take her instead, and the ground opened. The Uttara kanda is where the epic stops being a story about a victory, and the traditions that end before it are making a decision about what the poem is.

Whose telling#

There is no single text

Valmiki, Sanskrit: The oldest surviving text and the source for most later ones, in seven kandas, with the Bala and Uttara generally held to be later.
Kamban, Tamil: The Iramavataram of the twelfth century, a poem in its own right rather than a translation, which ends with the coronation and omits the Uttara kanda.
Tulsidas, Awadhi: The Ramcharitmanas of the sixteenth century, the version the Hindi belt knows, performed as Ramlila and recited daily in households.
Krittibas, Bengali: The fifteenth century Bengali telling, which adds episodes including Rama’s untimely autumn worship of Durga, the akal bodhan.
Jain Ramayanas: Vimalasuri’s Paumachariya and later Jain versions, in which Ravana is a noble Vidyadhara king, Lakshmana kills him rather than Rama, and nobody is a monkey.
Adhyatma Ramayana: A devotional recension in which Sita in the hut is an illusion and the real Sita is never touched, which resolves the fire ordeal by removing its cause.
Southeast Asian: The Ramakien of Thailand, the Kakawin Ramayana of Java, the Hikayat Seri Rama of the Malay world and the Reamker of Cambodia, each with its own emphases and endings.

Where the regions differ#

Tamil
Kerala
Telugu
Kannada
North
Maharashtra
Bengal
Punjab
Assam
Sri Lanka
Nepal
Gujarat
Odisha
Mithila
Kashmir
Tulu Nadu
manipur
rajasthan
konkani
sindhi
jharkhand
himalayan
kodava

Where it is kept: 6 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.

North India: Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is the household text and the Ramlila is played through the nine nights, ending with the burning of Ravana at Dussehra.
Tamil Nadu: Kamban’s Iramavataram is read as a Tamil poem, and the Dravidian political tradition has read Ravana sympathetically since the twentieth century.
Kerala: The month of Karkidakam is Ramayana Masam, in which the Adhyatma Ramayana of Thunchath Ezhuthachan is read aloud daily in households.
Bengal: Krittibas’s telling, and the akal bodhan, Rama’s out of season worship of Durga, which is the origin Bengal gives its autumn Durga Puja.
Mithila: Sita’s country, which tells the story from her side; Janakpur keeps Vivaha Panchami as the wedding day.
Sri Lanka: The island of the Yuddha kanda, with a Ramayana trail of sites, and a quite separate Sinhala tradition that does not treat the epic as its own.

All the works